Through the Glass, Darkly
by alchemyarchetype
Summary: Though he's kept bound and imprisoned in a glass cube, the Hell Lord can still reach out. He can still watch as the Sacrifices are, one by one, taken beyond the reach of pain and terror. His reflections are interrupted however when the Virgin and the Fool come to stand before him.


He felt them against the forefront of his temporal lobe; a constant skittering pressure that he could not touch and could not escape. The constant tease of human minds against his own was excruciatingly delightful and the edges of the blades that had been set into his skull shuddered and hummed at the sensation. The slithery, coiled ropes of his appetite had not been sated for nearly three years and he was growing restless.

He could feel the unwinding of the world and wished to have a hand in it.

The glass cube where they, the Servitors of the Old Gods, should not have been the obstacle it was. It looked innocuous enough; glass and steel fit neatly together so that nothing could get in or out. Not even air. Of course, he had long since gone beyond needing such trivial things.

He could smell his own blood and the leather cassock he wore. Nothing else reached him

Idly, as he had hundreds of times before, he pressed his will against the glass and steel of the cage. Immediately, old and twisting marks flared into golden light, pressing back against his will and keeping him imprisoned. He withdrew the tendrils of will and wish and turned his mind inward.

The sacrifice had all gone wrong, he knew.

Oh, he had sensed the death of the first woman. She had been simmering and ripe with desire. A creature of exquisite carnal delight… Her moniker of the Whore had offended him on a level so profound he had been unable to give voice to it, even in his own thoughts.

Musings of her so-called corruption had brushed against him from the keepers, those who had once been priests and priestesses to the ancient chthonic gods.

He reflected on their imprudence; they were very quick to cast stones against one who sought and took pleasure where she willed but then they were just as quick to watch her revel in her sexuality, in the delight she had taken in her own flesh and nerves. That they, his keepers, were too bound up in the dizzying tangle of guilt-loathing-desire-disgust and unable to simply allow themselves release made the tips of his fingers itch. He could show them. He could _teach_ them.

The runes at the seams of his cube flared sharply again.

Her death had been acerbic with fear and disgust and he had howled silently at the wasted potential. The sights he could have shown her, the sensations she could have explored… all undone against the sharp and rusted teeth of an ancient and unearthed saw.

A saw! A crude instrument meant for labor, not for _art._

His contempt made the pinpoint lights of white fire flare suddenly in his abyssal eyes.

Her death had been a bitter taste in his mouth, sour blood and old sweat against his tongue and teeth. She could have been exposed to the depth and breadth of suffering. She would have, he thought, been the first to embrace the pain and make it her own, reshaping her own fragile human structure into something more befitting for the darkness she would have housed.

She was wasted potential for beauty and horror. They had traded a slow and breathtaking erosion of the human soul for the abrupt climax of fear and death.

Sloppy work. Sloppy and stupid.

He had never been able to understand the Buckner family. Whenever their collective consciousness had brushed his, he had felt immediately weary; their tedious circles of vicious sexual destruction and faith based justifications had been used by countless men and women over ten thousand generation in innumerable religions and cults. It was vulgar.

They reveled in inflicting pain, on themselves, each other and on any unwary who had the misfortune to become their prey. But they had not understood it. The little one, Patience, had come close but only in her secret journal. She could have been an astute acolyte, he thought. However both brothers and father were as yet too human to truly understand immensity of the darkness laid at their feet.

They were like children, playing in the spume of waves and thinking themselves very bold and very daring but unaware of the full terror of the ocean even as crashed and heaved against their ankles.

He had little time for such children.

He had felt the fear of the other Sacrifices after the first death. It was a delicate and tightly tuned cord, trilling in near silence; an exposed nerve waiting to be coaxed and shaped by a master's hand.

But again, he had felt the bitterness of wasted opportunity.

The Buckners were blunt instruments, unable to feel and perceive anything other than their own pleasure. They were no teachers. They reveled in the agony and the fear of their victims but did not strive to enlighten. They had hammered at the walls of their quarry's hiding place, pulpy flesh that had been too long dead to experience anything but the faintest echo of pain. When they had finally gained entrance, they had proved impotent; unable to cause anything but disgust-fear in the chosen sacrifices.

Tedium.

He had felt with a sharpening of interest when the blood sacrifice of the Fool was given without any accompanying death. But he had thought then that it would be a matter of time. The boy might have survived for now but he was, after all, the Fool.

Deep within the darkness of the ever-shuffling machinery and far below the pounding feet and heart of the sacrifices he wondered. He had disdained calling the first victim the Whore after all. He had decided to keep quiet and close tabs on this wayward sacrifice as the game progressed.

He was smug in his knowledge that, had he and his acolytes been the ones chosen the Fool would have soon become part of _their_ ranks. Though the Fool's mind had been hazy with whatever intoxicants he continued to feed his system, it had been sharp enough to resist the fumes and gasses the Priests continued to use to sway the odds in their favor.

The death of the Athlete had been a slap in the face. It had been little more than an accident, a sudden blaring light in his eyes before death had gathered him up and spirited him away. There had been no pain, little fear and no enlightenment.

As the Virgin (and again he felt that sharp sense of offense at such an unworthy term for such stunning flesh) and the Scholar had fled from the precipice, their fear had settled. It had become a slow and sullen flow of despair. Exhaustion had taken over then, exhaustion and the need to buoy each other with hope. It would have been the time that, had he been the chosen nightmare, he would have allowed them a reprieve, a moment to gather their wits and heart again; there was no point in driving the human soul to the pinnacle of sensation if the flesh was too exhausted to feel.

The Buckners had, apparently, felt differently.

As with the Athlete, the Scholar's death had been bitter and exhausting disappointment. Pain, yes there had been pain. But less than Father Buckner would have wanted. The scythe he favored had severed most of the Scholar's nerves, had deadened an already weary body with barely a brush of true torment.

And then the Virgin was left. Oh, her fear had been piquant; at this point ripe and full and ready to burst against the lips of any lucky enough to truly savor it. She had escaped Father Buckner who yet remained trapped in a metal box at the bottom of a fathoms deep lake.

Her subsequent escape and brief respite had been, for the Priests and Priestesses, the end of their night. In his glass cage, looking into the faces of other monsters he felt their elation, relief and self-congratulatory revelry. For them, it was done. But he knew something that they had not yet learned.

The Fool still lived.

It was he who saved the Virgin from Judah Buckner who, with all of the delicacy of a bear trap, was attempting to drive her to new heights of fear and terror. She was too far gone to feel anything but an overwhelming sense of confusion and frustration, her mind uncoupling from her body as one question railed against the insides of her mind.

He had heard it, of course, as he heard all of their screaming, shrieking, terror-filled thoughts. This one was simple and it was often the one the sacrifices were all left with before they finally died.

_ Why?_

He would have told her, had he been there; had he been her guide to the new world of pain and fear. He had even attempted to reach out to her, to inflict his own brand of mercy on the red-tinged thoughts of the dying Virgin.

But the wards on his prison had kept him pent and he had resumed his passive speculation.

The Fool had been the hero. The Fool had lived, had rescued the Virgin… and now…

Now they were within the facility. He felt them growing nearer, felt her confusion beginning to fade away, felt her awareness of the situation slowly crystallize to understanding.

He would, he suddenly felt, be her guide into the world of true terror after all.

He had summoned the Requiem Sphere to him. The glyphs at the borders of the glass flared sharply but could not stop the small, metal puzzle from answering his call. It fell into the cup of his awaiting hands and warmed pallid flesh with the remembered heat of a living, human touch.

The Athlete has almost summoned him, after all.

And then she was there. The Virgin, blood-smeared, bruised and close to mental and emotional collapse, and as she stared at him he felt her dawning realization. Rage, horror and a shrieking injustice at what had been inflicted on her and her friends that grew far, far, far below her conscious mind. She was aware of it only as a hot, dull throbbing pain at the base of her skull.

She stepped forward, her blood-and-sweat matted hair hanging in limp ropes around her pale face. The buzzing fluorescent lights threw shadows harsh and ashy over skin that should have been dotingly flayed and opened.

There was such potential in her!

He matched her step until they were separated only by glass, the warding spells on his side glowing in soft warning at his proximity. It was an intimate distance, he thought as he stared down at her. She looked up at him, her hazy eyes beginning to clear. He saw the Fool turn out of the corner of his vision, felt the sudden fear and then, amusingly, frustration. He, at least, had gone past fear.

Through spells and runes and glass he looked down at her, down at her bruised and battered face and into the forge of her will. He clenched his teeth, a muscle in his jaw jumping spasmodically, nostrils flaring as he watched her, as if her could drink down the scent of her through airtight glass. Her anger gave her will, her will drove her fears to new heights as the need to survive returned to her battered and abused limbs.

She spoke then, but not through the glass, not to him but to the Fool. Explaining what she had gleaned, what she now understood.

He watched her lips form the words, _They made us choose._

Ah, but what a glorious creature she could have become. He could have taught her much, could have helped her inflict such damage on the rest of the world… on the Priests and Priestesses that had so long been out of his reach.

Her rage had been sudden and sharp, an abrupt heat to all of the sweetness of her pain and all of the salt of her fear. She had railed against him, against the glass. Her hands had been had been badly cut, the long gouges only just clotting. With her sudden onslaught they broke open and blood spattered and smeared; a living counterpoint to the agony that had broken over her.

He watched her unblinking, unchanging and_ wanted_. He felt a distant and weak form of sympathy for her. Confusion was ever the hardest burden to bear. She had been given nothing, had only figured out through her own temerity and the desperate need to find _some_ meaning in all of her suffering, in all of the death she had witnessed.

She had screamed, oblivious to the tears brightening in her eyes, but her voice couldn't penetrate the glass. The pain and fear could. He drank of that greedily. It was a rich and heady wine and he seethed that so much of it had been so badly wasted.

When the mechanism of the cages whirred back into life, he stepped back, watching as she was shuffled and rearranged like the rest of them.

Now that his attention wasn't focused so tightly on her, he could feel the mad scramble and alarm of the Priests and their servitors. They had become aware of the Fool then, and of the invasion of the menagerie and now they hastened to repair the damage before it could undo them all.

The bitterness of not being summoned was sharper now, his disappointment turned to something like rage. With such glorious canvases wasted on the dull machinations of the Buckner Family…! It was travesty and an offense to his senses.

He could have given them _(her)_ enlightenment; could have opened them to the agony of pleasure, exposing bone and flesh and muscle to the sensuous indulgence of ecstasy beyond any human endurance.

He closed his eyes and toyed with the idea of remaking their frames… or rather, allowing them to remake themselves in the image of Lazarus, she who ruled the Maze of Hell. He was her favored son and most devoted disciple and he would have been delighted to expose the Virgin and the Fool –and to lesser degrees the others—to the terrific wonder of the Goddess of Anguish.

He felt it then when the entire machinery changed its ever-shifting patterns. It stopped shuffling and reshuffling and suddenly he felt all of the creatures, all of the nightmares within their glass prisons begin to descend towards the demesne of the Priests.

His eyes snapped open.

She had released them. She had released everything.

She had released _him._

He shuddered, elated and impressed. She had given up on the idea of life. Whether she lived or died now, she would never go back to what she was. She was as much monster now as the rest of them and in her own way would celebrate it.

If she lived through the night, he swore to himself that he would seek her out and offer to show her all the delights and horrors that he had learned over the millennia. With a wry smile that never made it to his mouth, he thought that perhaps she would be able to instruct him on a few points in return.

But then he felt the wards on his cage falter, felt the screams tuning in the air like some vast orchestra. He could smell blood, heady and thick and set his thoughts of the Virgin aside… for the moment.

Before he could be teacher to her, he must first purge his frustrations on his keepers. It would not do to bring anger or passion to their next encounter.

With a soft, heralding chime of a bell, the doors of his prison slid open and he stepped into the bloodbath that was prelude to the end of the world.


End file.
